As college students continue to remain indoors and face unemployment due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many University of Oregon students have turned to opening their own businesses.

While quarantining in his home in the Bay Area, advertising student Daniel Aviña decided he wanted to do something more productive with his time. He soon started a marketing agency on his own. 

“I am always in my house doing nothing,” Aviña said. “There comes a point when you get bored and you want to really start advancing in life.” 

Aviña started the agency, Aviña and Lopez Marketing, after he ran the social media accounts for Chuck’s Donuts in Redwood City, California. After working for the company, Aviña decided he wanted to continue the work and turn it into a real business. 

“I’m more of an old-fashioned kind of person, so when I got my first client, I went up to them in the store and offered to do this for free,” Aviña said.  

Now, the agency manages 10 different clients and has hired two more UO students. Aviña partnered with his friend, Ivan Lopez, from the Latinx Male Alliance at UO. Lopez brought in a few clients from Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelancers. 

Aviña previously interned at an advertising startup during high school. “[The internship] was with this guy starting up his own advertising agency. He told me you can make your own in any game,” Aviña said. “The main message was, ‘Why not me?’” 

As the agency continues to grow, Aviña hopes to create more original content for clients in Eugene. “I am really into product photography, and the media these businesses give us to post is not that interesting,” Aviña said. “What I want to do is go in and take the photos for the company.” 

Other UO students have launched small businesses on online marketplaces like Etsy. Natalie Perez, a senior advertising major, began selling stickers and art prints on Etsy after the pandemic began. Much of the art serves as a tribute to her youth, Perez said. 

“I started off by creating images of food that were familiar to me,” Perez said. “One of my favorite items is a homage to the street food vendors of Los Angeles.” 

Perez said she has been interested in starting her own business since she was a teenager, but felt like she was too young to handle a small business. However, her parents encouraged her to pursue it. 

“By the time I was 16 I saw artists who had their own shops,” she said. “That made me happy to see other artists thrive and I always wondered if I was capable of doing the same.” 

Since jobs are difficult to find due to the recession, Perez decided to start her business, ShopScintilla, sooner than she had planned. She has earned a number of customers since opening shop and hopes to expand her products to include pins and acrylic charms as time goes on. 

The pandemic also created hurdles for student entrepreneurs like Eduardo Olivares, who was hoping to expand his business before the pandemic first began. 

Olivares, a junior majoring in advertising, started BounceBack Thrifts during his freshman year at UO. He soon met Harrison Stevens, another vintage clothing retailer who runs Stanley Thrifts. The two combined forces, creating the Neighborhood Eugene Sustainability Team.

Before COVID-19, Olivares said they had found a location next to campus to open a shop. They began negotiating the lease and were looking forward to moving in. 

“We were on a good track,” he said. “But obviously with [COVID-19], everything kind of fell through. It made it very difficult to tell what the future was.” 

Olivares said his goal for the N.E.S.T has always been about bringing the creativity of the students on campus to life. “It isn’t just about selling vintage 90s and 80s clothes, but it’s more of building a community,” he said. “We want to bring the community together and help empower each other.” 

While COVID-19 restrictions have proved to be a challenge for Olivares’s plans for the business, he said the pandemic has been an eye-opening experience for him and has taught him to keep going.

“Over the quarantine, it was a good time for me to just sit down and actually realize what I wanted to do,” Olivares said. “I sat down with my partner, Harrison, and we talked about the N.E.S.T and we really envisioned what we wanted it to look like.” 

Despite the uncertainty of the ongoing pandemic, it has also been a time for creativity to emerge and for new partnerships to form. 

In the spring, a group of students from UO, Lewis and Clark College and other universities across the country came together to create the startup media company, Parachute. The company is run by Gen Z women of color for Gen Z women of color, co-editor-in-chief Hanin Najjar said, and is focused on creating a safe space in media just for them.

“We are tired of the misrepresentation of women of color in the media and how we are kind of confined to these small boxes,” Najjar said, “and we’re not done trying to fight for a seat at the table. This time, we are trying to build our own table where all these voices are welcome.” 

Parachute first started with an idea from Lewis and Clarke college student Ochuko Akpovbovbo, Najjar said. Najjar joined in April when the media company was first established. 

It has since grown to have over 20 members, Najjar said. Over the quarantine, Parachute  began recruiting members from across the country, including students from New York and Chicago. 

Katey Williams, a sophomore advertising major, received a direct message on Instagram from Najjar and soon joined the team. Williams now works as the creative director. 

“I was super excited because I think one of the most important things in the media is changing the normal,” Williams said, “and I feel like pushing the status quo and being able to build our own table is the concept of Parachute that was super exciting for me.” 
Najjar said starting a company amid a pandemic working remotely has been a big learning process for its members.“When we started it, it was still the very beginning of the pandemic. We still didn’t know how long it was going to last,” Najjar said. “So one of the plans was to create in-person events or workshops, and now we can’t do that.” 

Parachute had to change some of its original plans, but Najjar said the goal has always been to reach a large audience and to create a community. “We want to create content that is useful to people,” she said. “We are creating something meaningful and creating a community through it.” 

Hanin Najjar worked for the Daily Emerald over a brief period during the 2020 summer